[-empyre-] Narrative, and speaking traces

[sarah drury]

Johannes, Hana, Christina and all,
I was somewhat unexpectedly out of internet range for a day or so and I'm
just now reading the excellent and thought-provoking posts of the past two
days.  I look forward to resuming this discussion tomorrow, when I've had a
bit of time to catch up...
Sarah



> Sarah, Also thanks so much for your interesting interpretation of the
> "Tesserae of Venus' in relation to skin or a technological skin.  I am
> really struggling with trying to write about this and your perspective
> is really helpful.  I just thought in this connection that it would be
> cool to share with you and -empyre- a new interview / conversation
> between myself and Caroline Bergvall recorded in April 2009.  Caroline
> is
> a UK-based  poet-performance artist-sound artist, whose work also
> relates very closely to this month's discussion, and who inspires my
> work on many levels. http://www.carolinebergvall.com/
> 
> So the interview is here-- it's raw audio, so please forgive the
> casual nature of it, perhaps you will enjoy.  The conversation deals
> with these themes of tesserae and erotic body ("venus" ) as non-
> abjective :-)
> http://christinamcphee.net/tesserae/venusdrawings_interview.html
> 
> 
> and it relates to some of the drawings you see here:
> http://silverman-gallery.com/artist/seriesworkview/1615/355/9817
> 
> 
> Christina
> 
> 
> 
> On May 29, 2009, at 3:48 PM, sarah drury wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> I've been on the road all day and have just found a rest stop with
>> wireless.
>> 
>> More on narrative: I¹d like to branch out from projects that explore
>> the
>> body  as ³the site or sites of multiple struggles, ambiguously
>> positioned in
>> the reproduction of social habits, requirements, and regulations and
>> in all
>> sorts of production of unexpected and unpredictable linkages² and
>> look at
>> projects that track artifacts of the body in space and place, with
>> various
>> ways of referencing the body as a tracking device for reading the
>> landscape.
>> Earlier in this month¹s conversation, Christina McPhee discussed her
>> project
>> Tesserae of Venus, that explores the buckling or folding of skin:
>> the skin
>> of the body, the skin of drawings of technological landscapes as these
>> drawings buckle and fold over time in the weather, the skin of the
>> photograph documenting this deterioration over time, the skin of the
>> earth
>> as it submits to processes of energy extraction and other kinds of
>> technological deformations, the skin of the buckling surface of the
>> carbon-saturated landscape of Venus, the cultural/architectural
>> buckling
>> that occurs as  ³biological systems clash and meet with technological
>> landscapes at the urban edge. In an online interview, she refers to
>> this as
>> an exploration of ³some sort of granularity of scale between the
>> human body
>> and geologic form.²  Ultimately the photographs and video are the
>> top layer
>> of skin, shed as a narrative form from this process. . ³Fault-seeking,
>> fault-finding, the performance drawings suggest field notes to a
>> geophysical
>> and psychic space that can only be realized in brief.²
>> 
>> In a project that focuses more on memory and the archaeology of the
>> ground
>> one stands on, Teri Rueb¹s ³Core Sample² creates a GPS-equipped,
>> headset-equipped  sound walk in which the walking body reads the
>> landscape
>> of Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor, a former dump and reclaimed
>> landfill
>> park visible just off the coast.  This project does not focus on
>> issues of
>> body trauma, but on the wanderings of the walker as a kind of
>> playback head
>> on the landscape, with the walker¹s coordinates, including elevation
>> relative to sea level, corresponding to exact points of narrative in
>> the
>> geological, archaeological, industrial, the more current
>> recreational layers
>> of the island¹s geological surface and including the
>> technologically-determined atmosphere above the island as well.
>> With each
>> step, the walker encounters geospatial tags and engages audio
>> narrative of
>> the many layers of density of information: the geological record and
>> satellite communication, air traffic control of the nearby airport,
>> the
>> archaeological record of native cultures on the island, the
>> artifacts of the
>> increasing speed and violence of usage of the last 150 years, the
>> current
>> recreational use of the island as a park.   Engaging the
>> unselfconsciousness
>> of the walker as a kind of empty state, the walker moves over and
>> through
>> the layers of human and nonhuman activity, engaging a four-
>> dimensional map
>> of narrative of the landscape.
>> 
>> The body¹s movement through the gentle recreational location spools
>> out its
>> embedded narratives, ³all sorts of production of unexpected and
>> unpredictable linkages².  The body¹s path reveals the location of
>> the place
>> in space extending from the geological core to the orbital¹s of
>> satellites,
>> its location in a historical continuum of production, consumption,
>> forgetting, cultural erasure.
>> Sarah
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> hello all
>>> 
>>> thanks to Sarah and this discussion that has been springing forth --
>>> 
>>> i was really interested by your emphasis on narrative, and hope we
>>> can come
>>> back
>>> to asking more questions about "narrative"  (different narratives) in
>>> relationship to voice (sounding/sound making/
>>> vocals/music) and movement, and in relationship to  body movement
>>> and
>>> gesture,
>>> and following the last statements you made, also in regard to the
>>> interactional design
>>> you describe in some of your examples (the narrative in design is a
>>> tricky
>>> issue, i would
>>> suggest, since working with interactivity, in my mind, is always
>>> counterintuitive and
>>> abjective.
>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>> Her movement was counterintuitive in the degree of learning and
>>> control
>>> required to manipulate her wearable accelerometers to achieve a
>>> specific
>>> graphic quality.  Practicing was about finding the movement that is
>>> both
>>> expressive in itself and also "draws". Lezlie's performance was
>>> highly
>>> controlled, highly choreographed, and was about control in some
>>> sense.
>>>>> 
>>> 
>>> i am not sure now how to address the many issues related to control
>>> and
>>> control systems
>>> (in such interactional settings of performance), but initially, i
>>> thought, the
>>> discussion was
>>> heading somewhere else, when you began to recount your work with
>>> Lezlie.
>>> I didn't understand what "normative embodiment" is, I also don't
>>> know what
>>> "fear of ephemerality" is.  I always consider it a joy
>>> (ephemerality).
>>> 
>>>>> 
>>> The "challenge to normative embodiment" may rest in Lezlie's body
>>> presence and
>>> movement themselves,
>>> in terms of the role of the gaze in the social construction of the
>>> body with
>>> dis/abilities,
>>> paralleling postmodern theories  of the gaze in the construction of
>>> the female
>>> body.
>>>>> 
>>> 
>>> I think you perhaps would have to talk more about what you assume
>>> such
>>> constructions to be like (gender -specific?
>>> age-specific? culture-specific? abilities-specific?), and how a
>>> behavior or
>>> performance performed can critique
>>> the gazes (which are all differentiated), and how such differencing
>>> works.
>>> 
>>> I am in rehearsal and cannot fully find the space to reflect and
>>> think of
>>> examples where i might have been confronted
>>> with : "existential anxiety" about the functioning of the body
>>> being seen, and
>>> by extension,
>>> the body of the viewer [my body?] , and "aesthetic anxiety"
>>> generated by fears
>>> of bodily difference in a society "with a quest for 'supernormal
>>> bodily
>>> perfection'."
>>> I would like to hear others respond to this challenge.  I don't
>>> recall
>>> aesthetic anxiety, unless you assume that we all are insecure about
>>> our "lack" or or difference from some assumed "norm"  - i don;t
>>> think there
>>> are any norms that anyone believes in except of course on the surface
>>> of consumption and sexual selection display.  Or are you also
>>> including
>>> "religious anxiety"?
>>> well, there is so much to say now.
>>> I hope we can come back to  the question of movement narratives.
>>> 
>>> I certainly think that all movement is inherently story telling and
>>> telling.
>>> And naturally so, it is also always also lying, no?  it is
>>> fashining our
>>> selves as movement characters
>>> in the stories we invent and retell ourselves and others every day,
>>> faking it,
>>> and being also quite serious about that.
>>> 
>>> In the everday sense [i would also think there is no everyday, but
>>> that we
>>> tend to live under constant or increasing stress symptoms and in
>>> symptotopographies, and so the question of anxiety is of course
>>> real, a kind
>>> of performance anxiety, and we smile now because that too is
>>> institutionalized
>>> and rhetorical now,  cliché) , the movement through our
>>> environments is
>>> something i assumed you'd be also addressing,
>>> when i think of walking or audio walks (Janet Cardiff and others),
>>> they sound
>>> is voice is oral culture of whispered and shouted memories or
>>> associations,  i
>>> love to listen to audio art and radio dramas,  they are rich to me
>>> and full of
>>> e/motion...
>>> 
>>> and then the notion of the trace as walking is something i came
>>> across this
>>> morning, in  preview of Richard Long's new exhibit at the Tate
>>> (Heave and
>>> Earth) in London, and the preview mentions the walking/ tracing in
>>> the
>>> landscape as a motion leaving shadows or foils,  i never saw the
>>> term foil
>>> before,  and apparently it refers to hunting vocabulary and the
>>> track that
>>> might be left by some legs or feet when they touched the dawn of
>>> the grass and
>>> its wetness, as first sunrays fall across the land.
>>> 
>>> I remember viewing DV8's "Cost of Living" and wondered how they
>>> wanted to foil
>>> me into taking it, feeling confronted by it?
>>> 
>>> What¹s a movement worth? £5 for a plié, one performer suggests in
>>> this piece.
>>> With arms  that¹s a tenner, add some emotion you double the fee. ³
>>> Heard you can do  some tricks², another man pesters a dancer. ³Do
>>> that thing
>>> with your leg. I can pay you,²
>>> I wondered how such critical work (if that is what it is, or is it
>>> exploitational? experimental? anxietal?)  is received by different
>>> communities/audiences, and how you narrate the work
>>> organizationally when you
>>> produce software interaction design with abled and differently abled
>>> performers in company or in schools or therapeutic environments;
>>> I noted recently also the work of Petra Kuppers (The Tiresias
>>> Project , an
>>> Olimpias Disability Culture Production), featured recently in TDR,
>>> with a
>>> stunning photograph of one of her collaborators on the cover.  It
>>> is certainly
>>> the case, i think, that methods are altered when dis/abilities are
>>> involved as
>>> a conscious /acknowledged fact.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> regards
>>> 
>>> Johannes Birringer
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> 
>> 
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